Versatile Specialty Glass Helps Create a Sense of Mystery & Discovery, Retro-Chic Appeal, and Environments Primed for Rapid Transformation

Decorative architectural glass is changing the way designers shape contemporary retail spaces, creating instant eye-catching cues to draw in shoppers during the holiday season and beyond. Our design consultants point to three macro tendencies – renewed retro-chic, cosmic luminosity, and metamorphic design – that will define the use of specialty glass and drive its development and specification in 2019.

Renewed Retro-Chic

The desire to create retail experiences imbued with a sense of mystery and discovery is driving the growing use of privacy textured glass in contemporary store fronts and partitions, as seen throughout Droese Raney Architecture’s Forty Five Ten fashion flagship in Dallas, TX. The multilevel boutique features our retro-chic linear textured glass, installed in matte-black divided-lite frames. Our exclusive Houdini™ micro-fluted glass creates the fitting room doors, combining the highest level of privacy and light transmittance.

Cosmic Luminosity

There is a growing demand for back-lit, luminous, sparkling architectural glass surfaces, including Bendheim’s color-shifting dichroic glass varieties. At the World Trade Center’s new Forever 21 apparel store in New York City by McCall Design, our Optichroic^® glass clads the walls and retail displays in vivid, dynamic colors that reflect and amplify the ambient light. The shifting glass hues add a kinetic quality to the space, drawing customers in.

A back-lit channel glass rainscreen facade by Bendheim is the attention-grabber at the recently renovated Blu Dot modern furniture showroom in West Hollywood, CA, by Standard Architecture. The luminous cantilevered glass rainscreen transforms the 70-year old structure, creating an otherworldly floating “crown.” The glass system’s unique frame design, free of intermediate vertical framing, contributes to the structure’s uniform, shadow-free cosmic glow.

Metamorphic Design

The necessity to design retail spaces that accommodate rapid transformations, including brand- and seasonally-driven updates, is a driving force in the development of our newest architectural glass systems. Bendheim now provides quick-install exterior and interior glass cladding systems for the rapid addition and replacement of decorative glass, facilitating metamorphic designs. With our new TurnKey^™ interior wall system, crews can update glass walls within minutes, demolition-free. For multi-store designs, the ease-of-use and flexibility of the system provide a rapid, budget-friendly method to welcome new tenants. Inside retail spaces, graphic glass panels can be replaced almost instantly for new product roll-outs or to service systems behind the cladding, such as LED back-lighting. Bendheim is currently working with a major national retailer to use TurnKey for up to 1,000 locations throughout the country.

The National Retail Federation points to experiential design as one of the key influencers in contemporary retail concepts. Our experts predict this type of design – characterized by memorable spaces designed for change – will continue to drive the specification of decorative architectural glass in the new year.

Contemporary Designers Turn to Time-Honored Material to Imbue Buildings with Color, Light, Craftsmanship, and Style

Innovating designers turn to our Lamberts^® mouth-blown glass in growing numbers to bring color, texture, and a humanizing touch to spaces. The movement can be credited to architects and designers’ growing appreciation for authenticity and artisanal quality.

Bendheim’s Lamberts^® glass is produced by skilled artisans having learned and honed their craft through the generations. Each sheet begins as a gather of molten glass at the end of a blowpipe. The master glass blower continuously works the molten glass to create an elongated bubble. Other team members join in to remove the ends of the bubble, trim, and form it. The resulting glass cylinder is then cut lengthwise, reheated, opened, and flattened into a sheet. The process is detailed in this five-minute “How It’s Made” video:

 

Blending history and modernity, art glass has become an increasingly popular choice to bring color and light to a wide range of buildings: new transit hubs, courthouses, hospitals, theaters, hotels, and restaurants. With non-residential building projected to increase at four percent in 2019, the demand for art glass is expected to continue to grow. Homeowners are also embracing the material, commissioning contemporary “stained” glass for custom windows, doors, and sidelites.

“This glass has a soul. It’s what draws people to it.”

 

In addition to a vast range of in-stock colors and designs, Bendheim’s mouth-blown glass can create a soothing effect through its signature texture. As light filters through the gently wavy glass, it appears as if reflecting off a pool of water. The effect creates a subtle connection to nature and lends a richer and more dynamic sense of the space. It is ideal for healthcare, hospitality, and transit facilities. The Children’s Hospital of Alabama in Birmingham, Alabama features mouth-blown Lamberts^® glass in art panels by Guy Kemper, reaching 19 feet high by 5 feet wide. Travelers through Indianapolis Airport in Indianapolis, Indiana can view brightly colored art glass by Martin Donlin, spanning 5,000-square-feet. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Austin” at University of Texas Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, features unadorned sheets of the Lamberts^® glass to bring playful colored light into the space.

“It is rewarding to see how the use of our Lamberts glass has evolved over the decades,” said Robert Jayson, Bendheim’s President. “From traditional leaded stained glass, as it dominated spiritual architecture decades ago, to some of today’s most celebrated public architecture… This glass has a soul. It’s what draws people to it.”

As the exclusive supplier of mouth-blown Lamberts glass in North America, we stock more than 500 colors, patterns, and textures in sheet sizes of approximately 24 by 36 inches.